Iain Hollingshead reviews BBC Two's timely documentary This World:
Michael Portillo’s Great Euro Crisis, in which the former Tory defence
secretary attempted to find out how the euro meltdown has affected attitudes
toward fiscal unity.

It would be difficult to find a more timely documentary than This World: Michael Portillo’s Great Euro Crisis (BBC Two) – although at the rate this crisis is going, there may not be any euros left by the time you read this.

The bullet-proof Portillo will no doubt still be around though, fronting his excellent programmes on everything from Wagner to wildlife. Here the former cabinet minister returned to more familiar ground, travelling to Greece and Germany to see if recent events had persuaded people to convert to Euroscepticism.

Not a bit of it, was the short answer. In debt-rife Greece, where car loans exceeded 8 billion euros in 2010, Portillo met everyone from former finance ministers to underemployed electricians to disillusioned economists. And yet every time he performed his amusing shtick of opening his wallet and proffering a drachma note and a euro, they chose the latter – although one can’t help but think that if he really wanted to be helpful, he would have produced a couple of sterling fivers and bought the whole country himself.

In Germany, he found the requisite middle-aged, moustached man to complain that the “Greeks should do some work for a change”. And the chief economist of the Commerzbank argued that a fresh start for the eurozone was impossible while Greece remains part of it. And yet here, too, he found wide support for the euro, the country caught between a rock and a hard place: eager to show solidarity with its neighbours without throwing good money after bad; keen to impose fiscal discipline without appearing authoritarian.

The likely result, he concluded convincingly, is a worrying democratic deficit in the EU as political solutions are increasingly imposed from above.